“Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.”

A very proud tradition and I only wish that liberals in Texas understand they are the inheritors of a proud and sustained resistance of conscience and intellect to the lowest-common-denominator conformism that has been so dominant in Texas and everywhere else for that matter.

Comment by Ex-Texan Now in Oregon |
March 18, 2010

Thanks for this excellent comment. Nothing I can add to improve such a comment.